I didn't want Obi to be sad, so I made this thread for his birthday. Now we just have to fill it up with stuff. So everyone needs to type in their favorite book here, one post per letter.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Ooo, a book club. Sorry, gabe, I was way off with that geek thing.

But, what the hey: David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn are my two favorite books. My favorite, more modern book is James Morrow's "City of Truth." Only about 180 pages, but worth reading.

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

I actually hope this thread will last awhile. I'm always looking for good things to read. I'm into Isaac Asimov's Foundation series right now, so if anyone's read it, tell me so I can start using my Hari Seldon jokes. They're gold, baby.

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

My favourite book at the moment is called "Dan Has A Big Red Car".

It is a heart breaking plummet into the depths of human obsession and self-destruction, exploring the evolution of intense desires into acute needs, needs which can never truly be fulfilled. Dan's quest through the darkest cellars of his soul and psyche takes him through a frightening emotional landscape which is beautifully rendered in the most exciting prose I have ever read, and this "journey through dark places" is finally brought to an end by an uplifting and hopeful climax, revolving around the discovery of self-awareness and personal enlightenment. At a hefty eight pages, it may be a thicker read than any of you have attempted, but don't be fooled - the pages are actually made of cardboard, so the whole book looks a lot thicker than it really is.

A remarkable and inspiring spiritual pilgrimage, which I highly recommend to anyone who likes cardboard picture books.

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This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

I'm reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

Uh-oh, we're back to the designed universe topic again...

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What others say about boorite!

I'm reading "the Birth Of The Modern" - World Society 1815-1830, by Paul Johnson. It's exactly 1,000 pages, plus 90 for the index. I figure we should go into full-batshit, brickwall, out-of-HDD-space-on-the-server mode on Johnny's account by chapter 3.

Love,

Thoroughly Modern bunner

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

Damn you, you pissant. This was supposed to be a joke, not a serious thread. ONE POST PER LETTER. You know, to fill up the thread so that Obi's Geek thread would be longer than mine. So disperse, you all! Away with you! Get thee to another thread post haste! Nothing serious here!

Git!

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I've always meant to get through the Foundation series. I think the first time I tried I was a little too young, or just didn't get hooked so I gave up early. I had a pretty good chunk of those around in junior high school and thereabouts. Every once in a while I get back to something I gave up on earlier and it usually turns out to be a good thing.

But books I actually have read... I tend to read semi-schlocky stuff. (Not as bad as my wife, who continues to choke down romance novels, though.) Lately my trend has been to find a particular author and read every book written by them I can find in the library.

I just read the couple of newer books Card tacked on to the Ender's Game series, then ended up with a couple of his Homecoming series which I'm working on know. (About halfway through 4 of 5) Not fantastic, but pretty good. His Alvin Maker series is great, too.

Other favorite sci fi is Asimov, Heinlen, and (forgive me) Hubbard. Has anyone else here ever managed to get through the entire Mission Earth series? Granted, the man was seriously deranged, but it makes for some entertaining reading. Battlefield Earth was also a pretty good read, though it made an awful movie.

David Eddings is pretty good. The series starting with the Belgariad and ending with god knows what (he keeps managing to tack more books onto it.)

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series is probably one of the best put together series I've read, but it's not done and it's so complicated that every time a new book comes out, I have to reread all the old ones to remember what the hell is going on. He tends to keep a couple dozen of important main characters all running around in different parts of the world doing different things all at the same time. It makes my head hurt.

On a completely different tack is Donald Westlake who writes comedy crime novels. If you've never read him and are looking for an entertaining read, check him out. Anything with his Dortmunder character is bound to be pretty good. Try the Hot Rock for starters.

He also writes under the pseduonym Richard Stark. Also crime, but a little more serious. People never get hurt in the Dortmunder books. It's like the GI Joe comics where everyone has a parachute when their plane blows up. When he writes as Stark he has no qualms about snuffing people. (He wrote Payback, which was turned into the film with Mel Gibson.)

Have I bored anyone to death yet? I wouldn't go so far as to say any of this is extraordinarily great literature, except for maybe Ender's Game, which I would call a must read.

And to show I'm not a complete loser, another of my top five favorites is probably Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, the autobiography of Richard Feynman.

I'm starting to rant. Like everyone else I'm sure, I could just keep spewing out books till I keel over. I'll shut up now.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Fuck me, that was long.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

Hm, I like the "Death and Return of Superman" graphic novel.

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Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants.

I highly recommend anything by P.J. O' Rourke or Florence King. Seriously. These motherfuckers hate everything and they're really articulate about it.

Love,
bunner

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

HEh, still waiting for Jael to heed the call, eh Gabe?

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Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants.

OK, since nobody appreciated my finely-crafted joke entry to this thread, here is a serious one. Bastards.

I am currently halfway through The Nameless Day by Australian fantasy author Sara Douglass. She is a former history professor at an Aussie university, but retured once se started making plenty of cash from writing. The great thing about her books is that they are based upon Douglass' encyclopaedic knowledge of history, so they are remarkably believable and true to life, even when they are dealing with fantasy.

The Nameless Day is the first book in a new trilogy based around 13th (14th?) century Europe, which was a century of incredible religious, social, and political change. The idea is that the supersitions of the time are true - there really are angels and demons battling on Earth, fighting for the prize of the souls of humanity. Into this comes a real-life man of the time - a former English general turned Benedictine monk. He is given the job of hunting down demons by Saint Michael, and bumps into such characters as Joan of Arc along the way.

The rampant misogyny is distracting, but true to the period (remember, it was written by a woman) but otherwise it is fascinating - brutal, nasty, but really engrossing - following this woman-hating former soldier turned holy man as he wanders through war and plague, chasing demons.

The Nameless Day, book one of The Crucible, by Sara Douglass.

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This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

Call? What Call? You saying i'm a call girl Dragon??? HUH! ;)

Man, I'm a voracious reader, so I have too many favorites. But the one I'm working my way through right now, is by a Fantasy author named Judith Merkle Riley called "The Master of All Desires."

It's about Nostradamus, the fools of the French Aristocracy, Catherine de Medici, black magic, and an undead talking head in the box called Menander the Magus.

I just finished a series by Modesitt, called the Spellsong Cycle, which I liked alot. Along with Anne Rice's "Violin" and her sister Alice Borchadt's Wolf series.

Next on the list is Alexandre Dumas' "Queen Margot"
and maybe in between with some light reading from Playgirl or something in the comedy genre like Penthouse Forum. ;)

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Women are fisher's of men because we all know.... The small ones you throw back. The medium ones you eat. The large ones you mount.

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and maybe in between with some light reading from Playgirl or something in the comedy genre like Penthouse Forum. ;)

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OK, since nobody appreciated my finely-crafted joke entry to this thread, here is a serious one. Bastards.

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Please tell me you are joking! I don't know who started the comparisons between The Fuzzy Bunny and the seminal Dan Has a Big Red Car, but it is plainly ridiculous. The Fuzzy Bunny is terribly over-rated, not only in my opinion, but in the opinion of all the literary critics who matter. The plot is terribly contrived and utterly uninspiring, the characters are hollow and lack any resonant humanity, and the pictures really suck. Let's face it, Dan Has a Big Red Car is not the best book since The Fluffy Bunny, simply because The Fluffy Bunny has never been a literary benchmark to anyone who truly understands the industry.

Be serious, please!

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This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

Two literary influences that have shown through in the comics I've made here are the works of Sam Beckett (my favorite being Waiting for Godot), and the Watchmen comic book miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (published by DC in the '80s, now available most easily as a trade paperback -- if you don't understand the alternate "Gabe" characters from Ko Fight Club, it's because you haven't read this).

Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther is good. I don't know if I should call it one of my favorites. But I found it very compelling. It reportedly inspired a rash of suicides when it was first published. Very emotional work.

For a more modern author, try picking up anything by Paul Auster. I read a couple of his books for a Fiction and Film class in my last semester of college. They have their flaws, but they're interesting, and they'll make you think.

Most of you are mentioning stuff from the sci-fi/fantasy genre. The truth is, while I say I like sf/fantasy, I really don't read much of it. I guess because there's so much bad stuff in the genre. I don't necessarily mind bad sf, but I'd rather have it in the form of an hour-long TV show than waste a few weeks trudging through several hundred pages of it. That said, the last good fantasy novel I read was a book called The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick. When I was in high school, I attended a day-long young writer's conference where I got to spend half the day in a sf/fantasy "course" he moderated, and as that was the book he had published most recently, he brought along a copy to promote it. A year or two later I got around to buying it, read it, and didn't understand it at all. But looking back on it, I guess it was a coming-of-age story. There's this girl, and she grows up. Takes her several hundred pages and happens in very strange ways, but at heart, that's what it is. I think. If anyone else has read it, tell me whether I'm right.

And of course, I need hardly mention the Hitchhiker's Guide "trilogy".

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

Here's a funny story. I mean, not funny in the sense of rivaling the troglodyte story, but maybe mildly amusing.

Last summer I was working out at Los Alamos. I was living in student housing and had decided not to take my tv since i watched too damn much anyway. I decided to read the classics instead.

So, I still had my computer and went online to look up the 50 greatest books of all time. I found a couple of different lists and they mostly had the same books, so I decided on a couple and went to the local library.

I went into the library, wearing a pompous and smirky air that even wirthling would have envied, and asked for the books I had predetermined as the top five ever. Expecting a show of respect for my sophisticated reading pallette, I was instead directed towards the Junior Reading section of the library, where all of my books resided.

And I've been sober ever since.

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

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I'm reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

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I know no one cares, but my favorite book is Lolita by Nabokov, whose name I honored by misspelling it in one of my comics.

[ Posted comic does not exist ]

If want more info about this book in the form of large numbers of pop-up porn advertisements, do a web search on the title.

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"Old" is the old new.

I'm of the opinion that you just can't beat any anthology series featuring adorable kittens causing their owners to fall in love with each other.

Also, erotic Meteor Man fan fiction, but not to toot my own horn here.

Anyone here read any Elmore Leonard? My wife and I were coming back from North Carolina and there was an article on him in one of those free airline magazine, going on about how incredible his character development was.

So when I got back I picked up a couple and read them. I just was gone this past weekend and had a few more to poke through. (2 books, each containing 3 of his earlier works.)

Here's what weirds me out about his style. Most books you read are continually leading up to a climax, which generally happens near the end of the book. But most books have a little 'cooling off' period. Maybe a chapter, maybe ten or fifteen pages. But usually something.

Leonard's books end within about three sentences of the climaxes. Most of the books I read it was people getting killed. They'd buy it, and the book would end. It just started to unnerve me a little. I expect a little bit of closure, some tidying up. But I get nothing.

Anyone else read anything by him?

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

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That said, the last good fantasy novel I read was a book called The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick. When I was in high school, I attended a day-long young writer's conference where I got to spend half the day in a sf/fantasy "course" he moderated, and as that was the book he had published most recently, he brought along a copy to promote it. A year or two later I got around to buying it, read it, and didn't understand it at all. But looking back on it, I guess it was a coming-of-age story. There's this girl, and she grows up. Takes her several hundred pages and happens in very strange ways, but at heart, that's what it is. I think. If anyone else has read it, tell me whether I'm right.

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I think you're right. And I'm also wondering if anyone else has noticed that some of the most legendary stories ever written just don't make sense.

Anyway, my reading tends more towards books like James Mills' The Underground Empire and Felix Greene's The Enemy. Make of that what you will.

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"Only things I approve of should exist." -some guy on the internet